A small Silicon Valley corporation says it has the answers to the problem of …

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Despite the advent of lower-power designs from Intel and AMD recently, today's processors are still power-hungry beasties. One company says it has a solution (subscription required) to the problem, which may lead to the kind of clock speed increases we used to see back in the heyday of Intel's "it's all about CPU speed" fixation.

Multigig, a small Silicon Valley firm, is proposing using high-frequency timing loops to synchronize processors. Currently CPUs use regular electrical pulses to keep all of their components in sync. Those pulses are responsible for over half of the power consumption in some processors.

Multigig's approach is to use an array of square "timing loops" placed in a grid. Instead of the one-way flow of the pulses, the pulses travel around the four sides of the of loops. The regular rotation of the pulses functions in the same manner as the clock circuitry currently used, but has the advantage of reusing most of the power. By using an entire array of the square loops, Multigig says the pulses remain synchronizedmore so than with current clock technology.

Right now, Multigig's solution is still in the early phases of testing. A research team at the University of California-Santa Cruz (go Banana Slugs!) says its simulations are spot on with Multigig's claims and it plans to begin testing on actual chips.

Given its early stage of development and the need for extensive redesign in order to slip square loop arrays into existing CPUs, it will more than likely be a few years before we see this technology in our desktops, laptops, and servers. However, you can bet that IBM, Intel, and AMD will all be paying close attention to the developments at this small Silicon Valley start-up, especially if it means higher clock speeds and lower power.